1. Storyline & Quests
The storyline in D:OS2 is slightly better than in the original game. In the first Original Sin, the story lost a bit of focus after the first major map; in the sequel, narrative cohesion is a lot tighter, keeping the same goal from beginning to end.
The pacing could use a few improvements, though. The Nameless Isle feels a lot like an end of game area; to go from there to a new major town feels weird - we go from a scenario in which we had to hurry to decide the fate of the world, back to helping a dog find his fluffy ball. At the same time, Reaper’s Coast makes it quite clear that we will go to Arx eventually, based on the amount of quests that mention the bigger city, so it’s no surprise at all that the Nameless Isle won’t see the resolution that the game hints it’ll have.
The game has many interesting quests, but it’s odd that some of them have no resolution. Playing as Sebille, for example, and choosing to kill the Mother Tree, leads to no resolution in the ending – no matter which of the main options we pick at the end of the game, the death of the Mother Tree is never mentioned.
And, speaking about quests, there’s nothing as bugged in the game as the Journal. A lot of quests never close, and many of those which do end with wrong text. For example, I was happily talking with a character who the quest log said had turned against me and had to be killed. I can’t help but wonder how often that’s just a mistake in the Journal, or if the game has actually recorded wrongly which quest options we took.
2. Main Characters
In the first Divinity: Original Sin, the two companions initially available were extremely annoying - both Madora and Jahan had extremely grating personalities. In D:OS2, we have in theory a lot more options… But the characters are not only annoying, they’re also very similar.
We have a character that’s extremely arrogant and thinks everyone from a different race is inferior – this description applies to both Fane and the Red Prince. We have a remorseless killer on a manhunt – this describes both Sebille and Ifan. Then we have Beast, the pirate (really? Is the next added character going to be a ninja, while we’re at stereotypes?), and Lohse, the joker. They are eventually given slightly more backstory than this, but it doesn’t change how they behave, or how annoying they are.
3. Graphics & Sound
I really like how the game is well optimized. My computer isn’t exactly new, but I was able to play with settings maxed, suffering slowdowns only when casting Spirit Vision. I had no other issue with performance.
The soundtrack, unfortunately, wasn’t as great. The first Divinity: Original Sin had unforgettable tracks such as “Dance of Death” and the Homestead song. D:OS2 has, well, nothing that really sticks. The voice acting is passable, but there’s also no performance that really stays with us.
4. Combat & Skills
The new system for memorizing skills is a lot better than in Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition. Instead of being limited to a small number of skills, or (even worse) to a tiered skill system, we can learn as many skills as we want, and change them any time out of combat. This is a lot better than the system in D:OSEE, on par with the system in the original game. I’m also happy at how respeccing has been made better – I didn’t use it often, but I really like how it doesn’t make our characters lose all skills (which is something that skill happens in the first Divinity: Original Sin).
I have a big issue with the combat system, though: Necrofire.
I’m really not fond of the Source points system. In the two biggest acts we have access to infinite source points, so most of the time they’re more a nuisance than anything else. Many of the Source skills are not worth being used simply because they’re focused on damage and have little utility (Overpower being one of the exceptions, thanks to how it knock downs targets). I would then ignore the Source skills most of the time…
…If not by Curse. I’m really not fond of the new Blessed and Cursed surfaces and clouds. Requiring both a Source point and a skill with a somewhat long cooldown to get rid of Cursed surfaces and clouds is extremely annoying, especially considering how many enemies can easily inflict Curse multiple times in a fight (either by casting it, or bleeding it, or through many of their other options). Necrofire is the worst offender here – it’s extremely annoying to remove, and enemies can just keep inflicting it anyway.
Now, this doesn’t make the game hard – the damage wasn’t significant enough, so most of the time I just gave up on removing necrofire and just tanked it. My issues are its side effects:
• A large number of battlefields were covered in (necro)fire. This added a massive amount of visual pollution, and made finding the enemies extremely annoying – no, the red outline on characters standing on fire did not help
• Water damage-dealing magic became borderline useless. With targets (and allies) eternally burning, no one would ever freeze, and everyone had high resistance to water and cold damage. Lightning magic was also of very little use, considering how the best lightning strategy in the first game – using water to spread lightning’s stun through enemies – would not work because the field was burning.
One other issue is how weak magic is. Most of the intelligence-based spells do very little damage, and have limited utility. Water and lightning offensive spells aren’t as useful seeing how almost everything is burning all the time, as mentioned above; a lot of enemies are immune to poison, and that element doesn’t really have a lot of utility in the first place; and fire has bigger damage numbers, but not much utility. Earth is more useful considering how its slow effect can ignore magic armor, but damage numbers still aren’t that great. My magic user characters eventually became responsible for buffing the party, using Teleport, and summoning a physical damage dealing incarnate.
I wonder if this is due to how the other skills depend on weapon damage, while spells don’t. Armed with good weapons, my characters using Warfare and Huntsman were far more powerful and more useful than my spell casters. The Huntsman character was extremely powerful – with the added bonus of high ground, he was by far the character with the most kills in my party, not to mention the most versatile character thanks to the elemental arrows and the best self teleport skill in the game (Tactical Retreat).
Lastly, I’m really not fond of the Armor/Magic Armor system. One of the greatest aspects of the first Divinity: Original Sin was playing with the utility side of skill effects, to manipulate enemies and the battlefield. The armor system prevents this from happening, since the beginning of each fight is almost exclusively about damage; and, considering how weak spell damage is, often it’s far simple to destroy enemies’ physical damage and follow up with physical effects than to deal magic damage and then follow up with magical utility effects. Almost all of my fights in the game consisted on the Warfare character knocking down enemies, the Huntsman killing enemies, spell caster 1 summoning a physical incarnate (that then knocked down enemies) and spell caster 2 buffing the party. It’s no wonder that some of the most useful utility spells are those that ignore magic armor, such as Teleport.
Now, I don’t think the game is too hard for casual players, as some people have said. What annoyed me often is how the enemies usually have stronger armor (physical and/or magical) than our characters, so often the party would be vulnerable to effects that the enemies would be impervious to.
(And, for the records, Spirit Vision is extremely annoying. There’s no situation in which it’s better to not use than to use it, and there are many situations in which it’s not obvious that it would provide the answer to a puzzle. I just stopped to cast it whenever it expired, which was far more an annoyance than a challenge.)
5. Crafting
Crafting suffered a massive downgrade from Divinity: Original Sin. In the first game, we could craft and upgrade equipment, which was eventually at least as good as what we found. In D:OS2, all equipment we craft is white – no mods, no upgrade, nothing. It turns crafting equipment useless, since it’s worse than anything we find in the game. The rune system is a very poor replacement to what we had in the first game, especially considering how we cannot craft rune slots in our equipment.
Other recipes are weird, too. Garlic is used in no food recipe? The recipe for crafting skill books (not crafted skills; rather, taking a scroll and turning it into a skill book) is extremely convoluted, and I still haven’t found a way to craft a blank skill book (and honestly I don’t think there’s one). The strategy of learning skills by crafting skill books, which was great in the first game, is almost useless here.
Other than arrows, crafting felt very useless for me.
6. Conclusion
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is nice. The main storyline is good, but honestly, I don’t like the majority of the new systems. Source Points, Source skills, the Blessed and Cursed surfaces, the Armor system… All of those are IMO downgrades from the first Divinity: Original Sin. There are some nice additions – the Memory system is better than what we had in D:OSEE, respeccing works better for those who want to use it, some of the new schools of skills are nice – but my favorite Divinity game is still the first Original Sin, classic edition.
Last edited by Erasculio; 22/10/17 02:03 PM.
